Have you missed me?  Website technical problems have deterred me from posting for the past month, but my inactivity is also partly explained by the fact that I’ve pretty much said what I want to say about the issues of the day.  The big stories of the past month or so have been Ukraine, abortion and the Court, and guns.  I’ve written about all of these things before, and honestly, I don’t have a great deal to say that I haven’t already said.  And, unlike most pundits and even some bloggers, my job doesn’t obligate me to write something x times a week, so I’m under no compulsion to repeat myself.

But I’m going to repeat myself now if only to point out that a fine editorial in today’s NY Times says pretty much what I’ve been saying all along.  The writer, Cristopher Caldwell, argues that by sending ever more arms to Ukraine, by saying Putin needs to go and labeling him a war criminal, and by declaring our war objective is to weaken Russia, the US has shown an inclination to escalate, rather than end, the war: “We have given Ukrainians cause to believe that they can prevail in a war of escalation.”   Zelensky did indeed say recently that Ukraine is aiming for victory over Russia. The US has done nothing, as far as I can see, to discourage that dubious ambition.   Caldwell cites Henry Kissinger (no pacifist) who warns that negotiations need to begin soon.

So, what should the US be doing?  The main point, as Ross Douthat puts it in another excellent piece in the Times, is not “to confuse what is desirable with what is likely, and what is morally ideal with what is strategically achievable.” Privately, the Biden administration needs to tell Zelensky that the US will not support a futile effort to expel the Russians from the Donbas region. That he needs to recognize the harsh reality that Ukraine will inevitably emerge from this war less than whole.  Publicly, Biden should say that our goal is a negotiated settlement in which both sides make painful concessions.  “Concessions” is not a word that I’ve seen from the administration in connection with Ukraine. That’s understandable, because, as Henri Guaino, a former top adviser to the President of France, acknowledges, “To make concessions would be submitting to Russia.”  But, Guaino adds, “To make none would be submitting to insanity.”